COSMOPOLIS, Grays Harbor County — For a long time, this small and struggling community along the Chehalis River bled money, but newly elected Mayor Linda Springer set a new direction when she assumed public office for the first time last year.
No longer can Cosmopolis rely on artificially high revenue estimates, waiting and hoping for the pulp mill in town — once its largest employer — to reopen. Budget lines can’t be filled in with promises and maybes, Springer said.
The city can no longer afford a financial director or city administrator, no major capital improvement projects or upgrades to aging infrastructure. It can afford to keep two full-time police officers, including the chief, on staff but can’t keep the station open to the public. For the moment, the city’s budget is out of the red, Springer said.
“We are operating on a very thin line,” Springer said. “We are just hanging in there.”
To stay afloat, Cosmopolis needs to reinvent its economy, current and past city officials say. They need tourism, retail, customer service — maybe they could attract a school or data center. Anything. Sure, they’d welcome the mill back. But their vision for the future can’t rely on whether the facility, called Cosmo Specialty Fibers, can be reopened.
The future of this mill, about 100 miles southwest of Seattle, represents a challenge to the logging and milling towns of the Pacific Northwest and to small communities everywhere struggling to survive in postindustrial America, contending with the scars left on their landscapes. These cities must decide whether they want to forge their own path or try to reclaim a bit of their past glory with the same industries that led to prosperity and then decline.
The picture is further complicated by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to breathe new life into places like Cosmopolis with his industry-friendly push to scrub the federal government of environmental, safety and health regulations.
The latest owner of Cosmo Specialty Fiber is looking to capitalize on the federal shift. The British investor with a checkered past in the industry has a grand vision for the future. If only he can settle his bills, square up with state and federal regulators, rustle up millions more and make long-overdue repairs, he sees a field of opportunity in Cosmopolis.
Others look at the mill and see a relic of a bygone era, harmful to salmon, streams and the environment even under the best conditions. This particular site has run afoul of even the most basic health and safety regulations for years.
Cities like Cosmopolis and nearby Aberdeen haven’t historically considered the true cost of the lumber and milling industries, said environmental economist Ernie Niemi. While they bring jobs and create needed products, they wreak havoc on the environment and churn out millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Better now to lay the mill to rest and find new ways to keep the community afloat, he said.
At the center of the debate sit all the people of Cosmopolis, a city of fewer than 1,700, nestled in the drizzly forests of Western Washington.
This time of year, the area is blanketed with a palette of greens and grays, and — if the weather cooperates — a peek of the snow-capped Olympic Mountains comes into view beyond the foothills to the north. Residents are a fiercely loyal bunch, quick to remember the days when they could set their watches by the shifts at the mill and count on the business to put food on their tables.
Most people there want the business to return, but will it ever be like it once was? Or are the boom days of the lumber and milling industry just shrinking smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror?
The future of “Cosi”
Mayor Springer brought with her into office a can-do attitude and rolled up her sleeves for the work ahead. She declined to take over an office within the tiny Cosmopolis City Hall. Instead, she posts up at a conference table in the front room, conducting city business while talking to friends and neighbors as they walk in the door. She greets each of them by name.
At times, Springer acknowledges her vision for the city — which residents endearingly call “Cosi” — has been unpopular. Change can be difficult, she said. But it need not be disheartening.
“I’m not feeling that doom and gloom,” she said. “I see a future for our community.”
Cosmopolis is the oldest city on Grays Harbor and it’s always had grand designs. Even its name means “City of the world.” Like its neighbors of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, it sprang up with Washington’s logging and milling industries, capitalizing on one of the region’s most abundant resources. In the mid-1920s, Grays Harbor was considered the largest lumber port in the world.
With all that lumber flowed money and thousands of jobs.
The Cosmopolis mill opened in 1888, owned by the Grays Harbor Mill Company. The global lumber behemoth Weyerhaeuser took over in 1957 and turned it into a pulp mill, creating things like specialty papers, plastic molds, fibers, cigarette filters and even toothpaste.
Former Cosmopolis Mayor Frank Chestnut remembers the old days. People moved in — like he did in 1973 — and they don’t ever seem to leave, he said. They like the small-town vibe. They like the low cost of living. They like knowing their neighbors.
And for the most part, Weyerhaeuser served as a good corporate neighbor, Chestnut said.
Entire generations grew up in and around the mill. But it wasn’t to last.
Cosmo Specialty Fibers
Over the decades, logging and milling companies cut jobs and automated more work. Environmental regulations also chipped away at the industry, which over the years pumped hazardous chemicals into rivers, streams and the atmosphere.
Beset by lagging profits and a changing industry, Weyerhaeuser closed the Cosmopolis mill and other operations on Grays Harbor in 2006, eliminating nearly 350 jobs and cutting off most of the city’s operating budget.
“Sixty to 65% of your revenue disappears overnight,” Chestnut said. “That’s a helluva bite.”
The city languished, he said. And the massive mill on its northern border sat empty, like a hulking ghost.
But British investment banker Richard Bassett saw an opportunity. By 2010, and backed by a California investment banking firm, he closed a deal on the mill and brought it back to life, albeit on a thinner budget. The resurrection drew broad fanfare across the state.
Bassett said he did the same thing at a bankrupt mill at Port Alice on Vancouver Island in 2006 and kept it running for a few more years before selling it to a Chinese company. That mill eventually closed and its owners declared bankruptcy, owing $272 million to a wide slate of creditors and leaving British Columbia on the hook for some $90 million in cleanup costs.
Cosmo Specialty Fibers closed again in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, sputtering to life once more only to lay everybody off just days before Christmas in 2022, Bassett said. Over the next few days, he forged a deal and took over as the sole owner, now envisioning a way to use the mill’s wood byproduct to generate electricity, a possible asset to the state’s electrical grid with perhaps even room for a data center on-site.
This type of thing has been done elsewhere and could unleash a torrent of money in America, Bassett said.
“We kind of thought we were on the side of the gods here,” Bassett said.
But reopening the mill has turned into a much bigger challenge than he ever anticipated.
A river of pollution
Turns out, the mill is in particularly rough shape.
Not only is a shuttered mill difficult and expensive to turn back on but the old owners — called The Gores Group — put off basic maintenance for years, Bassett said.
The place needs something like $50 million to $60 million for repairs, Bassett said. And despite his optimism, other investors are skittish.
Cosmo Specialty Fibers has a long history of environmental violations, including tens of thousands in unpaid fees, discharge violations and industrial spills. Bassett still owes the state Department of Ecology hundreds of thousands of dollars for carbon emission allowances and unpaid air and water permitting fees.
The federal issues are even worse. Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency leveled a type of regulatory order against the mill, which still hangs over the property. Bassett said the order is unnecessary and discourages investors, which stanches the money flow he’d use to fix the issues.
But in documents obtained by The Seattle Times, federal regulators warn of leaking acid and other hazardous substances left unsecured. The mill lacks water, electricity and security. The conditions give rise to the risk of a “potential catastrophic release,” the EPA’s acting regional administrator wrote in January.
Cosmo’s footprint extends beyond the mill site, too. Byproducts left over from the milling process were long pumped across town and into a series of retention ponds farther downstream where they were diluted with freshwater and treated before flowing into the Chehalis River.
Lee First, a Twin Harbors waterkeeper, strolled along the Westport South Aberdeen Trail in late January and pointed toward those ponds. The placid water is a sign of trouble. Even when the mill is closed, pumps are supposed to keep the water aerated to keep chemicals from settling, she said.
“It should be called the Cosmopolis Filthy River Treatment Trail,” First said. “You can’t see the freaking river.”
As part of her work for the national environmental watchdog group of waterkeepers, First tallies violations along the watershed and reports them to Ecology. She’s been frustrated with the state agency’s pace over the years. Regulators weren’t able to keep the mill in check when it was running, she said. Why would she expect anything different if it were to reopen?
Mills like this have left a trail of heavy metals and other toxic elements in their wake, First said. That poisonous legacy leads to asthma, obesity, heart disease and other complications for people living around them.
Other environmental concerns are just as bad, said Dave Seiler, a retired scientist for Washington’s Fisheries Department (now Fish and Wildlife), and not just for Grays Harbor but most any place with this type of industry.
In the 1980s, Seiler investigated declining coho salmon populations in the Chehalis River. About half as many salmon returned each year when compared to the Copalis River to the north, he said. The difference was that the Chehalis salmon had to swim through Grays Harbor and all its pollution from mills and other industries.
“That’s a river of pollution,” he said. “A story of resource extraction with absolutely no thought to the environment.”
Nostalgia or a new chapter?
While the logging and milling industry exacted a steep toll on the people and environment of this region, the benefits also flowed. Lumber from the region built cities like Seattle, Portland and San Francisco, First acknowledged.
Pulp mills like Cosmo are essential for more everyday products than you’d believe, Bassett added. Aspirin, phone and computer screens, fabrics, cosmetics. They’re the main competition for oil-based products in a society looking to free itself of a dependence on fossil fuels and plastics.
The industry kept towns like Cosmopolis booming for generations.
City Councilmember Kim Skinner said he worked at Cosmo for years and attitudes have shifted recently. Many still want the mill back in business but they also don’t miss its more unpleasant aspects.
“It’s quiet,” Skinner said. “It don’t stink.
City officials have relied on volunteer labor and grant funding to make ends meet. For some emergencies, they’ve had to rely on Aberdeen for help. Eventually, they’ll need a more stable tax base. They talk about the possibility of a brewery, retail shops, assisted living facilities, maybe a recreational marijuana shop. But businesses can be difficult to attract for a town that draws little outside foot traffic.
Other cities have successfully transitioned away from a heavy industrial economy. Think of Bellingham or Oregon’s Ashland, Bend or Medford. So why not Cosmopolis?
Get real, said Bassett: Why turn down millions from his mill in favor of whatever pittance the tourism sector might bring in. Few communities can pull it off, and he called that sort of transition “delusional.” If he can get the mill running again, he envisions more than a thousand jobs in the area. He’s worried whether they’ll be able to find enough qualified workers.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court slashed environmental regulations by overturning the Chevron decision, Bassett said he’s felt more optimistic about his chances. Trump built on that momentum by slashing environmental and health regulations at a record pace. Even the EPA is abandoning its guiding principle of protecting the environment in favor of economic stimulus.
There’s no going back to the way things were, said Erik Loomis, a historian with the University of Rhode Island who has written extensively about the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest. Only peril and heartache lie that way.
“It’s an economic dead end,” Loomis said.
Cosmopolis sits at a pivot point, Mayor Springer acknowledged. While the city and its people remain open to reviving the mill, they must also keep their options open.
A stone’s throw away from City Hall, Cosmo Specialty Fibers sits empty. Rust streaks down buildings and tanks that once brought prosperity to the community. Infrequent lumber trucks move along the highway just across the Chehalis River, all on their way to somewhere else.
